Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2019. Read them in this 11th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Contributed by Lee Atchison, Ravi Tharisayi, and Jean-Francios Joly, experts from New Relic

DevOps, Cloud and Kubernetes Trends

2019 has finally arrived, and with it comes a
new set of technical innovations and challenges to navigate, and manage. What
should we expect? At New Relic,
we are very interested to see how the software landscape will change, and how
DevOps, cloud and Kubernetes trends evolve over the next year.

Here is what our experts think:

Cloud
- Lee Atchison, Senior Director of Strategic Architecture

Cloud trends, such as increased public cloud
adoption and hybrid-cloud that were important in 2018 will continue to play a
role across the global market in 2019. Don't expect AWS's adoption and impact
to decrease, as it is still growing faster than all of the other cloud
providers combined. However, the industry will continue to benefit from the
healthy competition from Azure, Google Cloud Platform and IBM. The growth of
Azure specifically will bring more cloud success in Europe.

In 2019, I foresee more and more organizations
migrating aggressively to the public cloud and build net-new applications
there. Whether workloads are in the public cloud or on-premises, IT teams will
seek a platform that moves away from "static" resource allocation to "dynamic"
resource allocation - which means automatically scaling, dynamic routing, functions
as a service and other "serverless" technologies.

What's going to be especially important in
2019 is cloud management and control. Before, the prevailing motto was
"move to the cloud at all costs." In 2019, organizations will ditch
the "at all costs" outlook, and cloud waste management will
increasingly become a big focus for the C-suite and IT decision makers.

In the coming year, we may also see an even
greater focus placed on keeping data in-country and specifically "out of the
US," as the geo-political environment continues to heat up.

DevOps
- Ravi Tharisayi, Director of Solutions Marketing

As developers continue to take greater
ownership of code in production, instrumentation of production code will be
ubiquitous in 2019. Analytics and intelligence will play a strategic role in
guiding DevOps teams toward business critical focus areas and reliability
opportunities.

As more and more companies implement on their
DevOps and cloud transformation strategies, we will see a demand for people
with an operational mindset, a software engineering toolbox, and the social
engineering skills to bring established teams along on the journey. In most
cases, these companies often lack intelligent data they need to implement best
practices or make informed decisions, so they'll look to hire employees who can
instrument both software and infrastructure to provide improved visibility
across systems and infrastructures. Going forward, these skills will also be
important to measure the success of migrating their technology stacks,
including monolith to microservices, on-prem to cloud, and silos to integrated
operation teams.

Finally, DevOps engineers will increasingly
incorporate algorithms and machine learning to help automate and enhance IT
operations. For example, using analytics and machine learning to analyze big
data collected from various IT operations tools and devices will allow
organizations to automatically spot and react to anomalies in real time. The
rate of change in the industry makes it hard for individuals and organizations
to keep up with all the siloed data, so all organizations face the challenge of
finding and retaining people with the right combination of experience and fresh
thinking.

Kubernetes
- Jean-Francios Joly, Senior Product Manager

In 2019, we'll see increased Kubernetes
adoption and larger workloads. In addition to migrating their monoliths to
Kubernetes, customers are also creating entirely new applications on top of
Kubernetes. Kubernetes has become the platform of choice for microservices. As
a result, we should expect the average deployment size to increase over the
coming years. Additionally, most major public and private cloud vendors offer
managed Kubernetes solutions and have built serverless Kubernetes offerings,
such as Google KNative, AWS Fargate for EKS, or AKS virtual node. This approach
will make adoption easier by eliminating part of the complexity of setting up
and managing Kubernetes, while still providing the benefits of using the same
APIs and tools. In 2019, we will see serverless emerging on top of Kubernetes
with some bleeding edge players adopting it early before it starts to really
take off in 2020.

I believe that Kubernetes adoption will drive
increased cloud adoption in the new year. Universal support for Kubernetes from
the major cloud platforms suggests an opportunity for industry-wide growth. As
software teams begin to deliver their applications in containers instead of in
virtual machines, they'll be able to run their applications in multiple cloud
providers, ensuring that high-availability versions of the applications are
easy to build.

Kubernetes has the potential to play an
influential role in creating a hybrid-cloud strategy for organizations. The
portability of the Kubernetes API to multiple environments will enable
standardization of the tools that teams use and increase productivity while
reducing friction separating applications across different cloud providers.
Some organizations are becoming more concerned with cloud provider lock-in, so
the portability provided by Kubernetes offers a promising solution.

I also expect to see increased adoption of
service meshes. Kubernetes isn't a silver bullet for all things microservices
and containers. Kubernetes and containers are amazing for resource management
and allocation but limited regarding service-to-service communication from a
routing, security, or discovery perspective. Emerging cloud vendor services
like AppMesh and open-source projects like Istio (which has major backers like
Lyft, IBM, and Google) handle many service-to-service communication functions by
integrating them into the network in a language-agnostic way.

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About the Authors

Lee
Atchison - Senior Director of Strategic Architecture at New Relic

Lee Atchison is the Senior Director, Cloud Architecture at
New Relic. He's been with New Relic for over seven years where he led the
building of the New Relic Infrastructure products and helped New Relic
architect a solid service-based system. Lee has 32 years of industry experience
and learned cloud-based, scalable systems during his seven years as a Senior
Manager at Amazon.com, where among other things he led the creation of AWS
Elastic Beanstalk. Lee is also the author of the book "Architecting for Scale",
published in 2016 by O'Reilly Media.

Ravi
Tharisayi, Director of Solutions Marketing

Ravi Tharisayi is a Senior Product Marketing
Manager, APM. He has 15 years of experience in the IT industry, starting as a
Java web developer before a 10-year stint at IBM in consulting and marketing
roles. Having first-hand experience with the frustrations of the waterfall
software development methodology, Ravi is passionate about DevOps and
development on the cloud.

Jean-Francios
Joly, Senior Product Manager

As a product manager for Kubernetes at New
Relic, JF helps customers make sense of, troubleshoot, and optimize their
Kubernetes environment. Previously, he architected, deployed, managed, and
automated global and large scale Infrastructure as a Service offerings for a
telecommunications company and has worked as a product manager in a startup
developing open-source network virtualization and analytics software.